The title, we learn in the final pages of the final essay, is a joke,
taken from an epigram by Martial (5.24) for the gladiator Hermes. (V.
likes to tie things up at the end -- the source for the title of the first
study is revealed in the third; the source for the second on its last
page.) The epithet, V. teaches us, does not refer to the Christian Trinity
or to Hermes Trismegistos but is, like much of the poem, a send-up: "Ter
unus is not 'really real'. That is fatal to the person who is indicated by it.
He is not real either: the invincible divine gladiator does not
exist" (250f). Likewise the unity implied by the title is not 'really
real': the divine Hermes is hardly essential to V.'s reading of the
Martial epigram and the possibility of Hermetic
henotheism is not even raised. While Isis has a obvious claim to
henotheism ("the tendency to direct one's affectionate devotion to one
particular god, without, however, denying the existence of other gods" 1),
V.'s first essay has a much narrower topic,
using the paradox found in an imperial Isiac aretology (she "destroys the
mastery of tyrants" while being herself "tyrant of all the land") as a
reason to discuss at length the concepts of the (evil) awful tyrant and
the (good) awful tyrant, seeing a similar duality in Hellenistic kings
(benefactors and tyrants) and their relationship to their free but subject
cities, and concluding that this "unheeded inconsistency" becomes a
"conscious ambiguity" only in the Empire where "man paid for his new
freedom by deeper subjection to his divine liberator" (88) such as Isis.
That is, henotheism is in the first essay discussed at such a level of
abstraction that Isis is at best exemplary. It is only in the second
essay, that henotheism is fully described, in order
to make the argument that "the Dionysos of the Bacchae is pictured
as a
Hellenistic god avant la lettre. The truly Hellenistic poet of the
fifth
century has sensed the first signs of a new religious atmosphere and
projected them onto the only Greek god who could bear the burden"
(205).

That definition is perhaps the most successful sustained
argument in the book. V. outlines nine "well-known features of the
religious mentality of the Hellenistic and Roman period" which though
found individually are not found together in the Classical
period except in the Bacchae (190-204): (1) "claims to universal
worship"
are typical; (2) "miracles or epiphanies serve as evidence of a god's
greatness"; (3) beatitude "does not allude to expectations of afterlife"
but "is effected by the immediate divine presence, here and now"; (4) the
dogmatic elevation of one god above all others and the concomitant
affective exclusion of other gods" is typical [a slightly different
definition of henotheism than on p.1]; (5) worship is seen as "personal
submission or devotion to the god"; (6) "the refusal of worship is an
unknown phenomenon in the archaic and classical period"; (7) "gods are
invincible and the human rebel is doomed"; (8) "Historically the
punishment of mortals who resist (the coming of) a god does not become
topical until the Hellenistic and imperial periods"; (9) "public
confession of guilt toward the god" is typical. Now some of these can be
collapsed into one (6, 7, 8) and not all are found in the Bacchae
(not 4
or 8) and many can be found in Euripides' Hippolytus (1, 2, 4, 5,
6, 7),
and the questions remain whether we are talking about the Theban maenads
or the Bacchic chorus and whether this complex belongs to Euripides or
Dionysus, Athens or Macedon, but still the basic claim does seem
persuasive.

The argument of the central Bacchae study as a
whole is less successful. We are given a valuable survey of foreign gods
(Adonis,
Cybele, Bendis, Kotys, Sabazios, Isodaites) to show that "the very notion
'foreign' evoked various unpleasant associations: the smell of magic and
profit-making, connotations of licence or ecstasy, revelry and sexual
promiscuity and a special appeal to women and people of low social status.
Foreign cults also tended to
be associated with private or secret ritual, which in its turn fostered
all kinds of suspicions, especially when it involved participation by
Athenian citizens" (121f). But in actuality only Adonis and
Cybele fit even the
majority of these categories, and later
we are told "whenever foreign cults were admitted at all, their
incorporation tended to entail a radical denaturation of their original
character: Cybele, for instance, was tamed and indeed literally encaged in
her Metroon. No other exotic deity (perhaps
with the sole exception of Bendis) came to stay in the official cult of
the polis; private forms of worship were subject to severe restrictions"
(156). That is, two of the six examples cannot be counted and, since we
know virtually nothing about two others (Kotys, Isodaites), we are left
only with Adonis and Sabazios, both of which could be said to be
exceptions since they are private forms of worship that are not
subject to
severe restrictions. (We might also wonder why Hecate, Ammon and Isis were
not included, though we are told the first absolutely firm evidence for
Isis in Athens is mid-4th C.) Also, V. has the disturbing habit of
appropriating evidence from anywhere in Greece and applying it to Athens
-- not surprisingly he does not worry about where
the Bacchae was composed or performed. Finally, in his treatment
of the
Bacchae, V. disobeys the cardinal rule about literary texts he was
so careful to follow with Martial: "the failure to find a satisfactory
solution to this problem so far is caused by
the fact that the formula ter unus has been treated as a
religio-historical document by scholars whose preoccupations and specific
interests made them neglect the satirical nature of its context" (244).
First, the play is not treated carefully: Euripides
has stacked the cards against Pentheus, who is identified as a
theomachos
from the beginning and who receives no support from anyone for his
intransigence and is repeatedly warned by people to whom he should listen.
His charges against Teiresias are the usual ones: the Sophoclean kings
Oedipus and Creon when threatened by the prophet say the same thing. Thus
it is difficult to assent in V.'s "final" (!) conclusion: "the tragic
theme of the Bacchae is the conflict between two asebeiai"
(173). Secondly, the play is not put in the context of the whole
Euripidean
corpus. I have already mentioned how closely the Aphrodite (and Artemis)
of the Hippolytus match Dionysus in many "Hellenistic"
characteristics,
and there are other Euripidean plays to consider. Finally, there is the
context of Athenian drama in general: Aeschylus dramatized much the same
plot fifty years earlier. This does not mean that Euripides' treatment is
not different, but this issue needs to be set out and explored.

This incompleteness and incoherence is the negative side of an approach
that is loathe to
discard "the anomalous, the marginal and the inconsistent" (26) and
prefers "a history of inconsistency to the myth of coherence" (95). The
positive side is that the work is packed with interesting and informative
details. V. has read everything, and everything finds mention in this book
-- the citations run well over two thousand and range from 1989 back to
the seventeenth century. (My favorite is the pun between Hermes
Trismegistus, Martial's ter unus and the magister two lines
before: "apud Latinos magistri a magis ter videntur dicti" 219 n.67).
Moreover, about a quarter of the citations are within the last decade. So
this is the place to start if you want to know a bout the most
recent
treatment of Adonis, Cybele, Bendis, Kotys, Sabazios, Isodaites, Athenian
asebeia trials, maenadism and Bacchic thiasoi, gladiators,
hymn form, the
phrasing of Hellenistic aretalogy, Hermes Trismegistus, trinitarianism,
mystery religions, Ego-proclamations. The specialist in any aspect
of
Greek or Roman religion will find at least one reference he had
overlooked, often conveniently summarized and summarily evaluated.

V. speaks of his introduction as an "impressionistic, unsystematic and
highly inexpert hotch-potch" and one might apply that description to the
whole (minus the in-), but the adjectives that more obviously come to mind
are provocative, suggestive, judgmental, self-indulgent, learned. A work
to be viewed with some scepticism and considerable admiration.